Against Flatness
Andrew Holmes
I have always been fascinated by Holmes’s imagery and the pandemic provided a unique opportunity to explore his work from a new perspective. Viewed digitally, these drawings appear so flawless that it is almost impossible to detect their medium and their means of production. Beyond their technical resolution, the images speak for themselves. They hold a power that captivate the viewer and capture a particular mood. Take ‘Make Call’ for instance, there is an unsettling stillness to the surface, the flow of daily life has been interrupted and a seemingly ordinary moment is frozen in suspense.
Since May 2020, Holmes has been hosting a weekly Hi-Vis Radio series online. Every Friday 18:00 a themed playlist is accompanied by a series of images, taking one on a journey of unusual, raw and often under-explored soundscapes. They opened up new insights into Holmes’s work by placing it in a wider countercultural context. Last week, I had an opportunity to speak with Andrew about his work, in order to better understand the drives behind his unique observations.
We began the conversation talking about his recently completed drawing ‘Make Call’.
‘…the freeway became the ultimate “Americanness”, the great American national delusion…’Nina Shen-Poblete [NSP]: The drawings you make are distinctively different from the photographs you take. There is a quality to the drawings that captivates you and you can’t quite figure out what it is. They kind of suck you in, and demand you to examine the whole image very carefully. Looking or scanning the image itself becomes a very interesting experience. strong>Andrew Holmes [AH]: When people talk about the drawings, ‘this must have taken a long time to do’ is always the first question I’m asked, ‘there must be something important here, that someone has found this to be of great importance to spend so much time on it’. At the ‘Whitechapel Open’, one of my drawings was displayed to the left-hand side of a photograph (not my photograph) and both images were about the same size. Observing the viewers’ reactions, I noticed that there would usually be one person who looked at the photograph and left, but there would be a dozen people queuing to look at the drawing. Considering the average time people take to look at a work of art at the Tate, around 15 seconds, the people there (in front of the drawing) would be taking an average 4-5 minutes, and they were looking within 4 inches or 100 mm of this image, scanning all over it. I remember Doris Saatchi (Doris Lockhart at the time) when she came to the house to have a look at the drawings as she started out by professing her interest in Realist Art, she commented that these drawings are completely unlike anybody else’s. Because as you get closer to the image, it does not break down and remains sharp. But if you were to see a painting by Rembrandt for instance, when you get close to it you begin to see the flying brush strokes, and the image only begin to make sense when you are about 15 feet away from it. But with mine, you can walk backwards and forwards, and it would remain the same at every distance.< [NSP]: That’s very interesting – would you say the drawings are very ‘flat’ in that sense that they do not ‘pixelate’? [AH]: It is the same all over – what’s interesting about the photograph at Whitechapel for instance, it was grey although it was a colour photograph. That’s because the blacks weren’t black, and the whites weren’t white. [NSP]: That’s a really interesting optical and visual experience which these colour drawings are uniquely able to provide, quite distinct from other media say a realist painting or a photograph. I wish to understand something that you alluded to earlier, about the kind of subconscious estrangement, if you like, an element in the drawing that is at once familiar and bizarre, which I think also contributes towards its unsettling quality. Perhaps this lies in the way in which you put the images together, how you select the subject matter, the way you densify layers and meanings, some may not be apparent on the first glance?
‘It’s not any phone box, and not any car, and not any restaurant with a parking lot. It’s about the three things coming together in a perfect moment’.

‘Country music is interesting because it is the MEN who display the emotion – the American men are not supposed to exhibit emotions, but theirs are the most heart rendering songs in musical history.’[NSP]: During the lockdown, I have been following your drawing progress on Facebook, as well as the Hi-Vis Radio regularly broadcast on Fridays. The themed soundtracks, the slideshows, and these drawings, they all came together. [AH]: It is the same idea driving them all. [NSP]: Is it the same principle that you use to assemble the playlist when you combine your images? [AH]: I was talking the other day to someone about what makes one a great country artist and others just don’t have it. Of course country music and gospel music are very different kinds of music. Country music is interesting because it is the MEN who display the emotion – the American men are not supposed to exhibit emotions, but theirs are the most heart rendering songs in musical history. It is often combined with humour, as a disguise for the upset of the emotion. You don’t necessarily have to have gone through the emotion to convey it, but it helps of course. Compared with gospel music, which is the most complex folk music in the world and requires huge amount of techniques, a bit like Michael practising his lines. To watch the Blind Boys of Alabama perform is just an incredible experience, because they know exactly what they were doing, and they knew how to create the emotion in the observer, they knew all the triggers to press, so it was also a technical exercise. But like Mario de Alba, they understand the origins of the emotions they try to convey, and they are deep emotions. Then it’s the techniques which could be repeated every night to an audience, who would be in tears in 30 seconds. When I went to see the ‘Mighty Cloud of Joy’, there were six nurses in attendance and they were all needed, people broke down. This ability to convey emotion in a very simple way, as in country music, or in a more complex way as in the gospel music interests me. This is what the ‘compression of meaning’ is about. The images do it and the music does it, too. So you can travel in your car and you see the world differently.